No matter the uniform or opponent, UH always looking good

UH’s Armoni Brooks, left, celebrates with DeJon Jarreau, who came off the bench to lead the Cougars with 17 points Saturday.

Photo: Eric Christian Smith, Contributor / Contributor

The obvious introduction to this would be some morbid reference to the Houston Cougars wearing all black, appropriate attire for those charged with officiating a burial.

That would be too easy.

A suggestion that the Cougars should have worn traje de luces, you know, because the South Florida Bulls were in town.

Ba dum tss.

Before the Cougar faithful had found their seats, less than three minutes into the game, UH was ahead 11-0, and the Bulls were dead.

Except they weren’t. Well, not officially.

As required, they hung around for another 37 minutes, but it was obvious from the start that they had no chance of stopping UH from winning its 33rd straight home game, the longest such streak in the country.

The Cougars improved to 26-1 with a 71-59 victory Saturday in a way they have won so many games this season. They jumped on a team that isn’t as good, and for the most part they stayed on them.

Kelvin Sampson, who should be named national coach of the year, always has his team ready to play.

These Cougars, ranked ninth in the country, won’t get outhustled, but they will not get outcoached either.

We give so much love to their grit and grind, the Cougars’ precision and efficiency have become background singers.

Sampson likes it that way, and it will pay dividends come NCAA Tournament time.

UH can win ugly. If it must.

But there is beauty in how the Cougars attack. The pace, the balance, the attention to detail. Defense isn’t the only reason they have shot better from the field than all but four opponents this season.

UH plays smart basketball.

Oh, they will have a silly turnover every now and then, just as all college teams do. But if you didn’t know any better, you’d think they sometimes throw the ball away just so they can hustle back to make a great defensive play.

It happens every night.

When they take care of the ball, the Cougars are a difficult team to guard. They work to get good shots, they make the extra pass, they play team ball.

Not unstoppable, but unselfish and unbothered about who’s getting the shots, who’s scoring the points.

Corey Davis (15.7 ppg) has played at an All-America level at guard and has at times carried the Cougars, but UH has won by double digits a few times this season when he had poor shooting nights.

UH shot 47 percent from the field Saturday, with Davis and second-leading scorer Armoni Brook combining to make only 6 of 22 shots.

Reserve DeJon Jarreau led the way with 17 points, the third time in the last four games that he has led UH in scoring. Those three games (against Cincinnati and at UConn) are his three highest-scoring games of the season.

UH didn’t play anywhere near its best basketball Saturday against the Bulls, but the Cougars coasted to a victory because this is who they are.

Who, and what, can they be?

Seth Greenberg of ESPN’s “College Gameday,” which will be on campus for the first time in the show’s history next weekend, described Sampson’s squad as “national championship caliber.”

Every night they make that more believable.

With four conference games remaining, the toughest being the season finale at Cincinnati, which is in second place in the American Athletic Conference standings, the Cougars could very well enter the postseason ranked in the top five.

A No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament is a possibility.

Whether they wear Cougar Red, funeral black or a suit of lights, the Cougars look good.

Jerome grew up in downtown Acres Homes, Texas. He is a proud graduate of Mabel B. Wesley Elementary and was a basketball team captain at Waltrip High School, where he helped the Mighty Rams to a near-.500 record.

A math genius and engineering major in college, he's still working on this writing thing. He says that the three years he spent as an F.M. Black Panther probably played a more significant a role in the man he would become than the time he spent in college.

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